Thursday, March 22, 2018

Matt Levine Writes About CryptoKitties ("this column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners").

While we haven't heard Mr. Bloomberg explicitly state that he is in favor of CryptoKitties, it is difficult to see how he could argue with the comfort they bring as an antidote to the hurley-burley of daily life.*
Not to mention the "CryptoKitties as an asset class" angle.

From Bloomberg View, March 22:
...The crypto.
Look, I am not a knee-jerk crypto-skeptic. I write a lot about the rubes and hucksters and scams in the cryptocurrency sector, but there are also sophisticated investors, many of whom have deep experience in traditional technology venture-capital investing, who are bringing that sophistication and experience to the crypto space. These investors aren't chasing pointless fads; they understand the transformative power of blockchain technology, and are investing in the revolutionary infrastructure that will underpin the future of the internet, the financial system, and the world as a whole. Here, for instance, is a blog post from Union Square Ventures about how it is investing in ... oh, wait ... oh it's CryptoKitties, never mind:
At USV, we think digital collectibles is one of many amazing things that blockchains enable that literally could not be done before this technology emerged.
We also think digital collectibles and all of the games they enable will be one of the first, if not the first, big consumer use cases for blockchain technologies.
So, one, I am not convinced that there were no pre-blockchain digital collectibles -- I think a lot of gamers would disagree with that -- but more importantly, "X literally could not be done before blockchain" is not an especially good argument for X. The question is: Should X have been done before blockchain? Were people really sitting around back in the dark ages of 2006 saying "sure I can get an animated cat on my computer screen but so can anyone else; what I need is a rare animated cat"? Maybe? I don't know anything anymore.

Elsewhere here is "Buy Bitcoins Without Risk of Losing Money:...MUCH MUCH MORE (margin loans, enhanced stablecoins, Elon Musk's compensation and bond ETF liquidity)
*You can see the evolution of our thinking from November 2017's "Kittens On the Blockchain Is NOT the Future I Was Promised" to March 7's "The Blockchain Is Just Another Way To Make Art All About Money":
At least I'll always have my CryptoKitties. Besides being cute as can be, I was told:
CryptoKitties Sales Hit $12 Million, Could be Ethereum’s Killer App After Al
Through March 11's "Elaine Thinks About Signaling and Destroys My CryptoKitties Dreams":
Her piece was written a couple weeks ago i.e. at least two cryptocurrency price tumbles ago.
Think of a waveform, but not the smooth, soothing shape of a sinusoid. Rather think of a faux quasi-periodicity with just enough regularity to trigger a mirage of pattern recognition, just enough to suck you in, across the event horizon of speculation into the madness of Hunter S Thompson:...

https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2017/12/cryptokitties-1592x808.png